Category: Mobile Marketing Watch

The following is a guest contributed post to MMW from Shawn Arora, the founder of LaunchSpark, a Toronto-based explainer video agency with a focus on ROI.

2016 was a pivotal year for mobile advertising. According to an IAB report, for the first time ever, digital ad spend had surpassed the money spent on TV advertising. More importantly, mobile constituted a higher share of digital ad spend compared to desktop. As a platform, smartphones and tablets are no longer an innovative new channel that businesses with spare budget like to experiment with. Along with TV and desktops, they now constitute the vital third avenue for marketing spend.

But picking the right channel within the mobile platform can be tricky. The smaller form factor of smartphones make the medium unsuited for banners, interstitials and other similar forms of advertising. While these ad channels continue to constitute a significant chunk of mobile advertising dollars today, marketers enjoy a diverse portfolio of alternatives that offer better CTRs and conversion rates. Picking the right channel is a matter of understanding your consumers’ psyche and intent.

Product Categories

Product categories play a major role in determining what channel one must choose for mobile advertising. Products sold in a specific niche and have high pricing points are best suited for mobile search. This is because of two reasons – search advertising can be expensive and only makes sense when you have large margins. Also, consumers like to research on the product before they buy and it makes sense to reach out to them during their research process. On the other hand, if your product is an impulse purchase, then a Facebook marketing strategy works best. Display ads are great to build a brand while email or SMS marketing is very effective when you want to market exclusive offers.

Demographics

The mobile platform is an extremely effective medium to reach out to two specific demographics – the deal hunters and the younger audiences. The mobile medium offers the ability to ‘geofence’ prospective new customers which allows businesses to only spend money on customers who are located within a specific geography. Such level of precise targeting may not be possible with most of the traditional advertising medium.

However, the reason mobile advertising is on the rise is because of its ability to reach out to the millennial and the post-millennial generation. According to one study, mobile social networks like Snapchat and Instagram are the most preferred services to communicate among teenagers. Snapchat, for instance, is used by as many as 83.% of users in the 12-17 age category and 78.6% of users in the 18-24 age category. There are few alternatives to the mobile medium when it comes to reaching out to this demographic.

Customer Touchpoint

Traditional advertising medium like TV, radio and print do not offer an integrated touchpoint with the customer. Digital advertising over internet solves this problem to a great extent since consumers may now click on an ad and proceed to buying them in one integrated experience. While this works great for large and remote businesses, this may not be ideal for local businesses like real estate agents and attorneys. These businesses work on a leads basis and depend on incoming inquiries from prospective customers for business. Mobile search is an ideal channel for such businesses since prospective customers may now look up these service providers over Google on their smartphones and may tap and call these businesses seamlessly.

Virality

Viral marketing is a cheap and effective way to build a brand. According to a report published by Forrester, mobile users are a lot more likely to engage with content published on social media compared to desktop users. Their study found that nearly 49% of mobile users and 46% of tablet users click ‘like’ on content posted by company pages on a weekly basis. In comparison, only 37% of desktop users had a similar level of engagement.

The advertising channel you choose for your business can often make or break your campaign. The demographics and user behavior on the mobile platform can make this a lucrative medium for businesses. In the end, the success of a campaign depends on picking the right channel to reach out to your audience.

Immersion Corp., a leading developer and licensor of touch feedback technology, announced thsi week that it has signed a multi-year license agreement with Japan’s Nippon Seiki Co., Ltd.

Nippon Seiki, a global supplier of control panels for home, office and factory appliances, will license Immersion’s technology for its line of printer and copier products.

With Immersion’s haptics, Nippon Seiki will enhance its human-interface technology with high-quality tactile effects and feedback, appealing to users’ sense of touch and creating a more intuitive interface for the operator.

“Touch is one of the most fundamental ways we connect with the physical world, and we envision a world in which virtual experiences are indistinguishable from physical life,” said Nobumitsu Shimada, Immersion’s Representative Director and Country Manager, Japan. “We look forward to working with Nippon Seiki to add haptics to the interfaces of its control panels and providing its customers with enhanced digital experiences.”

There’s a new feature MMW has learned about from Upinion that helps brands easily connect with their audience to gain “powerful ongoing insights.”

Upinion has just introduced integration with Facebook Messenger.

“The new feature comes as an enhancement to the research platform that focuses on facilitating market research through chat messaging,” an emailed statement reads. “Previously Upinion enabled brands to have ongoing survey conversations with their customers, employees and stakeholders on the Upinion Messenger app. This feature signals the company’s belief that mobile chat messaging is the future of market research.”

If you’re not familiar with the platform, here’s what we can tell you:

Upinion seamlessly integrates questions into Facebook Messenger. It allows clients to invite anyone to a conversation right on their Facebook page; minimizing barriers to respondents and maximizing on Facebook followers. It includes easy brand customization, quick deployment with a multi-device interface and the power of analytics.

“There are more than 1.2 billion users on Facebook Messenger. It’s where people have conversations with friends and family on a daily basis. Chances are, you will find your next AHA moment there,” said Mo Ouass, co-founder of Upinion. “We saw this as an opportunity to help our clients engage with their respondents in their natural social habitat to find ongoing authentic insights for everyday decision making. We believe that the Upinion Facebook Messenger integration, coupled with the Upinion research platform, will provide companies with a significant competitive advantage.”

MMW learned today that Kaizen Platform is now officially a Facebook Marketing Partner and Instagram Partner, specializing in markets across the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

“It is an honor for us to be selected as part of only 34 approved Creative Platforms,” a provided statement reads.

“This badge represents the quality advertisers receive when they use Kaizen Ad to optimize and refresh video ad creative. We are excited for our future as a Facebook Marketing Partner, specifically focusing on enabling marketers scale their creative and expand their business globally through Facebook.” says Kenji Sudo, Kaizen Platform founder and CEO.

Shutterfly, Inc., the leading manufacturer and online retailer of high-quality personalized photo products and services, and David’s Bridal, the leading bridal and special occasion retailer in the United States, today formally announced an expanded partnership.

The deal gives Shutterfly direct access to the largest concentration of brides in the US through the David’s Bridal website, dedicated emails, direct marketing communications and over 315 retail locations. In addition, brides will be able to choose from a new assortment of expertly curated wedding invitations and day-of stationery designed by David’s Bridal beginning in early 2018.

The collection will be available through the newly launched Wedding Shop by Shutterfly, and it will provide customers the unique ability to match their stationery “look and feel” with the corresponding David’s Bridal color palette they select.

“David’s Bridal leads the bridal industry in terms of scale,” said John Boris, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Shutterfly. “This new partnership further enables Shutterfly to directly reach the over 1 million brides that David’s Bridal serves annually and is the perfect springboard for the launch of our new wedding initiatives, including the Wedding Shop by Shutterfly.”

Their contributions highlight consumer-centric solutions to chief marketing officers’ challenges, data-driven marketing strategies and the use of technology to better support people based marketing.

How people perceive, interact and engage with a company at any point in the customer journey is top of mind for all executives. Many are grappling with how to build a customer-obsessed organization. Equipping marketers with the technologies and techniques to truly understand and connect with people is a logical starting point. Yet keeping up with the latest technology, trends and best practices is a constant challenge.

RampUp is an open forum that addresses these pain points by sourcing content from a variety of industry voices, ranging from CMOs to data privacy officers and neuroscientists. Their stories and points of view cover a wide breadth of topics that share a common theme of improving the consumer experience:

Analyzing new technology trends affecting how people interact with brands

Building data-driven teams with the right martech stack to support their work

Balancing the art and science of marketing

Presenting people-based marketing best practices and use cases

“There are a lot of educational events and content hubs that focus on using technology to solve the challenges facing the marketing industry,” said Anneka Gupta, co-president at LiveRamp. “But the content on RampUp will take a different tact, starting by focusing on what it takes to improve the consumer experience. If we collectively solve for that, we all win. In creating an open forum that allows everyone to share their thinking on best practices to this end, and collaborate and learn from each other directly, we hope to accelerate this trend.”

Ahead of the weekend, MMW learned that AdTiming — one of the world’s leading mobile analytics marketing platforms — is expanding into North America as a means “to address growing advertiser and mobile developer demand.”

As part of the move, AdTiming will seek to deepen ties with mobile developers by providing faster self-serve options that maximize monetization opportunities, while leveraging its deep data analytics capabilities to deliver more accurate ad targeting to North American brands eager to tap into the Chinese market.

AdTiming shifts the old model of placement-based advertising to audience-based marketing. Handling more than 18 billion daily ad requests across 200 countries, AdTiming supports clients in Europe, China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America and now North America – one of its fastest growing markets. AdTiming also has an extensive partner network including Nexage, Smaato, PubNative, Smartyads, Advocarrot, Yex, Axonix, Adview, Gothamads, Inneractive, Cheetah and more.

By analyzing mobile data traffic across a wide spectrum of channels – SDK, API, Exchange, commercial Wi-Fi, and traffic exchange and combining this with key consumer profile information such as IP, Device ID, Android ID and IMEI, AdTiming is able to generate more accurate audience segments that enhance precision targeting and improve advertising performance, as well as optimize future media buys and ad creative.

“It’s all about better understanding the customer. Big data mining, in-depth analysis and application are making an enormous impact on ad delivery. By leveraging our deep data mining and analytics capabilities, we are shifting the old model of placement-based advertising to audience-based marketing,” said Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Leo Yang. “We cover more than 200 cities in China and facilitate more than 20 billion data ad transactions daily – rendering more than 300,000 unstructured tags. As a result, we are well positioned to help North American advertisers and mobile developers reach and roll out more effective market entry strategies to maximize their ROI in the Chinese market and beyond.”

According to the insight gleaned from the report, header bidding continued to thrive worldwide as more publishers replace the old auction waterfall system with this solution.

Mobile PMP impression volume in PubMatic’s platform rose 75 percent year-over-year (YOY) in Q3 2017, making it the seventh annual improvement in as many quarters. Desktop remained strong in the overall picture as app monetization still provided the largest mobile advertising opportunity. The volume split between app and mobile web environments normalized after six quarters of market rebalancing.

Additionally, we’re told that mobile continued to drive header bidding growth with a 252 percent year-over-year increase in mobile web impression volume in Q3 2017. This trend is indicative of the need for wrapper solutions like PubMatic’s OpenWrap that empowers publishers to utilize a holistic approach of both client and server-side across formats, including mobile web and in-app. Publishers can use header bidding to improve their mobile monetization while retaining control of their user experience and performance.

“Mobile, once regarded as the third screen is now quickly becoming the first screen for many consumers globally which has accelerated header bidding on mobile,” said Rajeev Goel, co-founder and CEO at PubMatic. “Publishers should be in control of their ad decisioning and those looking to take advantage of both server-side and client-side header bidding should implement a single, holistic wrapper solution to avoid the limitations of a multi-wrapper solution.”